Storm in the tropical region of the moon Titan

With all of the Earth-like features - rain clouds (liquid methane, not liquid water) on the surface create lakes and rivers, large sand dunes in arsenic-like areas, and an atmosphere. Many orange smoke looks like Los Angeles during the wildfire season - Saturn's largest moon, Titan, is 'a very calm weather', said Mike Browwn of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

'We can observe for many years and hardly realize what happens. This is bad news for people trying to understand Titan's meteorological cycle, not just because events don't happen regularly, but we often miss what happens because no one wants to waste time. on large telescopes - the equipment needed to study the position of clouds and what happens to them - observing what doesn't happen ', Brown, Professor Richard and Barbara Rosenberg on Astronomy study the planet.

However, just because the weather does not occur 'does not mean' does not mean it never happens, or astronomers, at the right time and position, cannot catch the activity of the weather.

That's what Emily Schaller - a Brown-led graduate student - and colleagues achieved when they observed, in April 2009, a storm system appeared in the mid-dry latitude and then expanded. Southeast. Eventually, the storm produced some bright but brief clouds on Titan's tropical latitudes, an area where clouds had never been observed - and of course, it was thought to be particularly rare.

Schaller, now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Arizona, Brown, and colleagues; Henry Roe, former Caltech postdoctoral scholar in Brown's group, is currently at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff; and Tapio Schneider, professor of environmental science and engineering at Caltech; describes his research and its implications for climate on Titan in the August 13 issue of Nature.

A massive storm erupts in the tropical desert of Titan (Photo: Emily Schaller et al./Ginini Astronomical Observatory)

" A few years ago, we built an effective system on a smaller telescope to determine when to use the largest telescopes," Brown said . The first telescope, belonging to NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility, on Mauna Kea, observes Titan's spectrum continuously. 'Since then we cannot conclude much, but we can say' no clouds ',' there are some clouds 'or if we are lucky' giant clouds ' , ' he explained.

Schaller explains: 'The stage we collect data for my thesis, sadly coincides with a period of no cloudy stretch, so we have no chance to express the synergy of telescopes. But after I finished the thesis, I went back to the script to look at the data of the previous night and found that Titan suddenly had the largest clouds ever seen. I like to think that it is Titan's graduation gift for me. Or maybe it's a tantalizing joke. '

Immediately after the telescope's big discovery, Schaller, Brown, and Roe began tracking clouds with a large Gemini telescope on Mauna Kea and watched the system grow for a month. 'It was a great performance,' Brown said.

'The first cloud is near the tropics and is the result of a mysterious process, but it works almost like an explosion in the atmosphere, creating waves moving around the planet, creating clusters of their own clouds. Within a few days, a large cloud system covered the South Pole, and scattered clouds were observed until the equator. '

Schneider, an expert in the atmospheric cycle, helped classify complex sequences immediately after a cloud activity outbreak.

Brown said: 'The month-long event has a lot of significance for understanding the hydrological cycle on Titan, but one of the reasons why it's so exciting is the first appearance of the crowd. The clouds near the equator - where the Huygens probe (European Aviation Authority) landed. Many people have been guessing that the equator is too dry to be cloudy. '

Photos taken by the Huygens probe in January 2005, when it landed on Titan's loose atmosphere and headed towards the surface, revealing small-scale channels and streams that looked like they were made by substance. liquid - on Earth is water, and on Titan can be liquid methane.

For many years, experts have had different predictions about how these channels and streams may appear in an area without rain. The results of this study show these doubts. Brown said: 'Nobody considers the possibility of storms in a storm-stimulating location in many other locations.'

The article 'Typhoon in the tropical region of Titan' appeared in the August 13 issue of Nature. Research by Hubble postdoctoral scholarship, NASA planetarium astronomy program, and the National Science Foundation support